> So Meier altered the game to more closely match human cognitive biases; if your odds of winning a battle were 1 in 3, the game guaranteed that you’d win on the third attempt

I wonder how many people are going to learn probabilities all wrong because of this. Whatever they learn just won't feel right because hey all these games work the way it makes sense intuitively.

Imagine a coin that flips heads exactly every 2nd time because it's a 50% probability. Would make magnificent future casino patrons or startup employees or ... well a lot of things that rely on chance and probability.

Good point. I once heard "playing/games" defined as learning in safe setting. It would be ironic if we self-sabotage our (already bad) sense of probability.

The "pseudo-random distribution"[1] used in Dota2 comes to mind as well.

[1] http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Pseudo-random_distribution

An interesting side-effect of this style of RNG is that if you need to get a particular RNG roll to win a PVP conflict, you can 'farm' up the roll by waiting until you've gotten sufficiently unlucky during PVE, then go to PVP where you will have a much higher chance of getting one right away.

I'm not sure if Dota2 has mitigations against that, but I've certainly seen it in other games.

This is actually a strategy in game.

Go and hit a neutral unit so that you have 2+ hits in a row without your ability/item proc'ing and then save the next hit for an enemy player since your next hit is likely to have a higher chance of proc'ing.

In league of legends you could previously "auto-cancel", and critical hits have different recognisable animations. So if you were about to crit a minion you could cancel the auto-attack and "store" the crit to hit an enemy with it.

I think that's been patched now but it was there for a good while.

This existed in Dota2 for some time as well; one could use an (illegal) mod to quickly start/stop attacks until it found a crit animation.

It would be best to have a random state per target, but I don't know if they do.

Which IMO is done well and makes the game less random.

I hate this system with a fiery passion. On the low end it turns a doable-but-not-great chance of hitting, say 30%, into a you-might-as-well-not-try 9%. I wanted to punch someone when I read about the fake percentages on a forum and suddenly understood why I never seemed to hit anything below 50%.

edit: My example's not averaging, forget which game I was using where they multiplied them together somehow.

The recent XCom games maybe? I don't remember which way they fudged the percentages though.

I'm a big XCOM fan so I can say for that game that the RNG is messed with on lower difficulties to protect you from a bad streak. So if you miss 3 70% shots in a row, the next one will actually give you an 80% chance, escalating as your bad luck streak continues. On non-easy difficulties the chance to hit is honest as far as I know, a 30% chance to hit is actually a 30% chance.

XCOM2 does it too.

You can see the code in there : https://twitter.com/m1sp/status/697268847187890176

It is increasing your chance to hit if you've a missing streak and if you have lost soldiers. And lower the chance of the enemy hitting you if they've already hit you this turn and you have less than 5 soldiers. So you can (and will) miss 90% shots, it should not happen twice in a row the same turn.

They cheat in player's favor.

http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Chance_to_Hit_(EU20...

This actually makes me sad. A 1/10 chance should happen sometimes (as a 1 in a D20) and the randomness is part of the fun of the game. If a 80% chance is actually a 92%, I think should just show a 92% chance, it would be more fair.

I think this unfortunately contradicts player expectations most of the times. Even for non-gaming "random" things, people tend to see patterns where there aren't any, and "fairly close to true" random functions feel like they're being modified even when they aren't.

I'm briefly recalling some lectures during University that we're hardwired to find patterns, even when there aren't any, and we make some pretty wild conclusions about the patterns we find this way. I've seen otherwise fairly reasonable players during DnD tell me it's time to "switch to the late night dice" because the current D20 hits a bad luck streak after awhile, and they adamantly adhere to this.

With games it's the same way. League of Legends tweaked it's crit chance algorithm to be a little less random because it could be so wildly swingy and players didn't like it - crit reliant champions would either feel amazing as they melted, or they'd feel useless after a series of successive non-crit attacks. The Dodge mechanic was removed almost entirely since a few select champs could have amazing fights where they got lucky and got 3+ dodges in a row even at relatively low dodge percentages.

It sucks to be the type of person that does understand probability in a reasonable way, but the evidence in games shows that just isn't how the grand majority of players operate.

I see many echoes of the sentiment that players don't understand probability in this thread, but I think it's worth considering that maybe also a compromise between randomness and determinism in games is more fun than either alone.

Have you ever heard people hating on you in a forum for adding randomness to a multiplayer game. And its not even limited to one side- both sides will hate on you. One side, because you "rigged" the game, the other because they can not be sure, whether there victory is down to being lucky. They dont want randomness- they want that sweet Adrenalin shot, when things go wrong and you barely succeed with your head on your shoulders on third try.

And yet I bet they're more addicted or fueled in their rage. The most vile gaming communities are also huge. It may not be a causal link, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I'm fairly certain Battle for Wesnoth does this and it just made the game frustrating for me when very low probability events occurred. Probability doesn't scale mentally that way. I mean, I have a degree in Mathematics, and I know what this means. I still didn't like it happening.

Battle of Wesnoth probabilities are often frustating, yeah, but at least it teaches a lesson of independent random events and proper perception of probabilities.